MOSCOW, November 23. /TASS/. Moscow will send congratulations to the winner of the US presidential election when its official results are summed up and all legal issues are sorted out, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday.
"The president-elect must be announced, the incumbent president himself must recognize the outcome of the election, and all lawsuits must be completed. Only after that the results will be officially summed up," he said. In his view, "it is obvious that this has not happened yet."
Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier explained that he had not congratulated the winner of the US election yet, since all legal issues had to be ironed out. He also recalled that in 2016 many congratulated Hillary Clinton, although it turned out that Donald Trump had won the presidential race.
Commenting on Putin’s remarks, the Kremlin spokesman explained that "in this case, it is a figure of speech." "Indeed, last time when Trump was elected president, all the projections by experts on the US and sociologists indicated that Hillary Clinton would win. This is what the [Russian] president meant," he said.
Peskov stressed that the Kremlin preferred to wait until the court proceedings were over. "Without that, there will be no official election results, the [Russian] president said that many times," he noted.
On November 3, American citizens headed to the polls to elect 435 representatives to the House, 35 senators out of 100 to the Senate, and the President and Vice President of the United States. Though the vote count is still underway, major US media outlets project that the Democratic contender has presumptively won the presidential election. Both Fox News and Associated Press have put Biden over the top, beyond the needed 270 vote threshold. Trump is challenging the current outcome, claiming irregularities in the ballot processing in key swing states, and has filed lawsuits to fight his case in court.